By Jason Snell

A $299 Apple TV: Is that all there is?

This summer, I stood up for the Apple TV hardware in the face of one analyst who said that it was “essentially dead” because nobody would spend $200 on a streaming device. I wrote:

Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.

Well, this week the Apple TV got some attention, in the form of a hardware update that came along with another price increase, up to $299. If the Apple TV’s base price of $199 made it “essentially dead” for anyone but the most die-hard of Apple customers, how much more dead could this fourth-generation model be?

While I’m obviously not a fan of the theatrical declaring of products dead because they don’t meet one analyst’s definition of success—lots of products are profitable and successful without taking huge market share—I do think that the $299 price tag puts Apple TV hardware in a really tough spot. (And to analyst Dan Rayburn’s credit, this week he made his point with a little more finesse: At $299 “it won’t appeal to the masses,” he wrote.)

These days, pretty much every TV you buy comes with an embedded computer that means you don’t really need to buy anything to make it work with streaming services. A stroll through my local Costco reveals a panoply of enormous TVs with high-quality screens, low prices, and embedded OSes from Roku, Amazon, Samsung, or Google. They all have all the apps, and all the services.

As a result, the addressable market for an external TV box just keeps contracting. For most people, what’s in their TV will be good enough. That leaves the rest of us, of course: the people who realize that the embedded systems in TVs tend to be slow and inelegant and are even potentially built on privacy-invading surveillance technology. But there are, sad to say, a lot fewer of us.

This change in the market means that cheap streaming sticks, once a mainstay, are essentially irrelevant. They’re no better than what’s in the TVs out there. Maybe there was a day when spending $20 for a Roku stick at Walmart made sense, but those days are largely over.

For the people who do care, who do want something better, the options are more limited. Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is $199. Roku’s “Ultra” is $149. The Google TV streamer, my favorite of all the non-Apple products on the market, is $150.

When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.

In the past, Apple has offered a second, lower-priced Apple TV model alongside the fully specced-up one—the previous low-end Apple TV 4K lacked Ethernet and had less storage space—but that’s not currently the case. I’ve seen some commentators suggest this is a good thing because it “simplifies the product line.”

I don’t follow that argument at all. Having a cheaper product is good, because not only do some people not need Ethernet or large amounts of storage on a streamer box, but lower prices broaden the market! (The iPhone product line could be simplified if we got rid of the iPhone 17e, iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and heck, iPhone 18 Pro Max, but I don’t think that would be a very good idea!)

So why only one Apple TV 4K this time? There are three possibilities. The first is that Apple just doesn’t care about trying to reach people at lower prices, and has resigned itself to the fact that tvOS is an exceedingly small niche product for its most committed customers. It’s possible, but I don’t want to believe that.

The next possibility: Given how weird chip supply and cost issues are right now, Apple has prioritized releasing its high-end product, and will release a lower-end model at some point in the future once it can make enough with the parts it has on hand. Going to market with a brand-new Apple TV 4K in the lowest-end version doesn’t make any sense… you’d always start with the high-end model that is going to be an instant buy for your hardest-core customers who don’t mind the price tag. Then you backfill later with the stripped-down model that maybe doesn’t have as much storage, or those fancy microphones, or an Ethernet port.

And finally, it’s possible that the Apple TV hardware world is in flux because Apple wants to make a different product that hits a lower price point. One that’s less full-featured than the top-of-the-line model, but different enough that it’s not just a variant of the existing product. This is the long-theorized “Apple TV Stick,” and I’m not sure that product needs to exist if the company can just make a box that’s more competitive with the high-end offerings from Google, Amazon, and Roku. But at least it’s possible, and might even be preferable if there are key markets asking for it. (I recently stayed in a hotel with Apple TV boxes on the back of every room TV. Would hotels prefer something a little simpler to install? I honestly have no idea.)

Regardless, as someone who thinks that tvOS—despite all its limitations—offers the best TV media streaming interface experience out there, I hope Apple cares enough to keep it alive and keep it relevant for the small market of people who can’t imagine being stuck with using the software embedded on their TV sets. The masses may not care, but we care, and if that’s not a recipe for a successful Apple product, I don’t know what is.

It just needs to start at less than $299.

If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.